12 quotes
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Ariel (1965)
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
Ariel (1965)
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Ariel (1965)
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.
Ariel (1965)
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
Ariel (1965)
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.
Ariel (1965)
Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware.
Beware. Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Ariel (1965)
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Ariel (1965)
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
Ariel (1965)
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Ariel (1965)
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Ariel (1965)
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? — Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults,
That kill, that kill, that kill.
Ariel (1965)